EC Board approves 2 new ECWG members

Explorers Club headquarters notified the ECWG in early September that the EC Board of Directors had approved the membership applications of Barbara Schoeberl, FN 10, and Huan Cui, FT 10,both of whom live in the ECWG’s geographic area, which makes them ECWG members.

Barbara Schoeberl

Several ECWG members met Schoeberlat the Feb. 8, 2014 ECWG Cosmos Club luncheon honoring the life and work of Bob Simpson, FE ’79. She set up photo displays on various aspects of Dr. Simpson’s career and talked about working with him and his late wife, Joanne Simpson, who was also a notable atmospheric scientist.

Her career has focused on producing scientific illustration, movies, and posters. This work includes the Earth Today exhibit, which is an affordable and flexible museum display system. She has produced movies and associated movie elements including a nine-minute High Definition movie “Earth Science Vision 2030” and Earth Observation 2030. She also produced several movies in support of the joint Japan-U.S. Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission satellite explaining rainfall, the water-energy cycle, hurricanes, and El Niño. Her other activities include SCUBA diving, and extensive travel with a focus on the environment.

Huan Cui, who was born in China, is a graduate student in the Department of Geology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is a Ph.D. Candidate in Paleobiogeochemistry. His personal Web page has a unique biography that that uses maps of China and Maryland.

He was one of five awardees of 2014 ECWG Exploration Grants. His research is “Searching for Early Animal Skeletons and Reconstructing the Biogeochemical Fuse to the Cambrian Explosion from the Ediacaran Dengying Formation, South China.”

Huan Cui in Tawney’s Cave in Giles County, Va, during a University of Maryland Geology Department field trip.

In his application Cui said: “The sudden diversification of animal life in the Cambrian Explosion around 530 million years ago is arguably one of the most important biological watersheds in Earth’s long history. The driving mechanisms that lead to the evolutionary big bang, however, are still incompletely understood. One thrust of my research in geobiology is in understanding the fossil record and possible environmental drivers for this biological revolution.

“The field site I want to investigate is a rock unit called Dengying Formation in Three Gorges Area of South China. Previous study reveals that this rock unit was deposited between 551 and 541 million years ago, in the dawn of the animal life Cambrian Explosion. Numerous fossils have been discovered in this rock unit, representing the earliest group of animals with skeletons evolved in Earth history.

EC Term Membership is open to full-time graduate students and teaching instructors that meet the same standards/qualifications that exist for regular Members. Details on the EC Headquarters Web site.